



tftfi 



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A SERMON 



ON THE DEATH OP 



PRESIDENT GARFIELD 



PREACHED IN THE 



First Church of Hartford 



BY 



GEO- LEON WALKER, 



PASTOR. 



September 25, 1881. 




A SERMON 



ON THE DEATH OF 



PRESIDENT GARFIELD, 



PREACHED IN THE 



First Church of Hartford, 



GEO. LEON WALKER, 
n 

PASTOR. 



September 25, 1881. 




HARTFORD, CONN.: 
THE CASE, LOCKWOOD & BRAINARD CO. 

1881. 






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Isaiah 2 : 22. Ps. 146 : 4. 

"Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils." . . . 
"His breath goeth forth; he returneth to his earth: in that 
very day his thoughts perish." 

How solemnly these words utter themselves in 
onr hearing to-day, sounding out of the cloud which 
darkens all the land! The frailty and vanity of 
human power ; the might and mystery of mortality ; 
the greatness and awfulness of Divine Providence; 
how they echo and reverberate in the events which 
crowd upon the Nation's thoughts this funereal Sab- 
bath morning ! 

And what a tremendously added emphasis do these 
facts and monitions derive from the sharpness of that 
contrast between what seemed less than seven short 
months ago, and what indubitably is to-day ! 

Not seven months ago a man in the full vigor of 
physical and intellectual strength stood up at our 
National Capitol and took the oath of office as Presi- 
dent of fifty millions of people : to-day a flying car 
has just borne along the lines of one of our inland 
railways a shrunken and mutilated form, to be depos- 
ited in six narrow feet of Ohio burial-ground. 

Not seven months ago there was committed to this 
man, by virtue of the office to which the nation had 
called him, the supreme executive functions of a gov- 
ernment equal in power and responsibility to any 



on earth : to-day the emaciate hand is as void of 
strength and of authority as any subject of an alms- 
house funeral. 

Not seven months ago the Land congratulated 
itself with having called to the foremost post of 
public leadership a distinguished citizen, already tried 
on many a field of civil and military enterprise, — 
a man probably better endowed with the varied 
resources of acquired intellectual furnishment than 
any other who had ever occupied his office ; and 
trusted that under his guidance the nation was to 
be led in an onward and upward pathway of pros- 
perity and honor : to-day, instead of following his 
inspiring and compelling leadership, all that there is 
left to those who would so eagerly have trod in the 
pathway he should pioneer is to gather up his poor 
relics, and bury them under the green sward from 
human sight forever. 

Yes, so far as the outward and visible life and 
career of the man James Abram Garfield is concerned, 
— the man but a few hours a2;o President of the 
Republic ; Commander of the National Army and 
Navy ; Fountain and distributor of public office and 
recompense ; Head and embodiment of our civil fabric 
and commonwealth, — all is over. 

In silence and in tears the whole land this Sabbath 
morning stands wondering and mourning over the 
event. Quite impossible is it to turn our thoughts 
to-day to any other theme than that which the provi- 
dence of (rod so distinctly forces upon us. The 
greatness of the stroke; the vast consequences which 
may now from it: the very considerable consequences 
which have already come from the preliminary inci- 
dents which have led on to this event of mortality; 



the sense of personal loss and bereavement which 
each one of us feels, and above all, the remembrance 
that this is no accident, but a part of God's direct 
dealings with us, all conspire to make it proper and 
necessary that this first Sabbath of our sorrow 
should not go by without an attempt, at least, to bring 
ourselves into a proper position to begin in some 
measure to understand the meanings of this o-reat 
affliction. 

Into any extended biography of the life, or analysis 
of the character, of James Abram Garfield it is quite 
unnecessary for me now to enter. Everybody here 
knows already the simple and, on the whole, the noble 
and lovely story. Parents in coming generations will 
tell their children about their knees of this poor boy. 
the youngest of a family of four, brought up upon 
an Ohio clearing, and trained to axe and hoe. They 
will tell how he worked his way through school and 
academy; toiling through midsummer days and winter 
evenings to secure money to pay his little tuition bills. 
How a college education became a passion to him ; 
and how, by industry and self-sacrifice, he won his 
way in I 85(5, at the age of twenty-five, to a graduate's 
diploma at Williams and a debt of four hundred and 
fifty dollars. How then he taught school; and found 
soon after the greatest prize and blessing which was 
ever to come to him (however so many were to be his 
honors) in the love and truth of Lucretia Rudolph, 
his now widowed wife. How at the outbreak of the 
war, in 1861, he entered the Union army, and fought 
bravely, leaving the army as a major-general. How 
he resigned his commission at the express request of 
Abraham Lincoln to enter the House of Representa- 
tives to support the government in Congress. How, 



from that time to the summer of 1880 he continued 
in Congress, unquestionably the best-read man in it, 
and uniformly one of the leaders of thought and 
legislation during the debates and controversies and 
reconstructions of these eighteen laborious years. 
How at a national political convention in June 1880 
he was, unexpectedly but with vast enthusiasm, nomi- 
nated for the Presidency, and in November of the 
same year was elected. How in March 1881 he was 
sworn into this supreme office of the nation before the 
gathered dignities of the land, ami in the presence of 
his grey-headed old mother, whose faith in her "boy 
James v had been the support of his youth, and at that 
hour was the crown of his manhood. How through 
all tli is long period he had maintained the character 
of an able, lovable, studious, modest, and christian 
man; a helper of the needy and a soldier of the Cross. 
How, if erring sometimes in judgment, and perhaps 
through over-compliance in friendships led into mis- 
takes, he left no occasion to question the integrity of 
his purposes and the unselfishness of his aims. How 
on the morning of July 2d he was shot down by a 
miserable, vagrant office-seeker; a man whose mind 
seems less to be deranged than never to have been 
arranged ; a compound of vanity, duplicity, knavery, 
and greed. How through eleven weeks and upward 
he lay a helpless and declining invalid ; a cheerful 
and courageous sufferer; ministered to as no son of 
Adam was ever ministered to before, and watched 
with a solicitude and attention by a waiting nation 
and an anxious world, such as no crowned monarch 
ever knew, and such as is absolutely unparalleled in 
all the story of the human race. How, at last, on Mon- 
day September 1 9th, he died, and how the nation we] >t. 



and other lands sorrowed in nnison, — this will be the 
simple, romantic, noble story parents will tell their 
children in years and generations to come, for their 
inspiration and cheer. Yon know it all. Every news- 
paper of onr land amplifies and augments it, with 
pleasing incident and illustrative anecdote. So we 
need dwell no longer upon this. 

Turning now to some reflections which arise in view 
of this event, in whose presence the nation reverently 
bares its head and puts off its sandals to-day, the 
first suggestion which seems forced upon ns is the 
mystery and sovereignty of Providence. 

However we may recognize the guilt and respon- 
sibility of the wretched human actor in the tragedy 
of our President's death, it is impossible to stop 
there. The heart cannot stop there. The mind 
cannot stop there. The nation has not stopped there. 
With an instinct universal in human nature in every 
ag<\ an instinct which refuses to be misled by any 
([nibbles of purblind half -reason, men's hearts and 
minds in this event move straight on to the recogni- 
tion of God's hand in it. 

The Providence of God has ordered what has 
befallen ns. The old Hebrew, clear in his convictions 
of God's absolute righteousness, but equally clear in 
his recognition of God's all-pervading sovereignty, 
felt no contradiction in terms when he said, " Shall 
there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it ( " 
Nor is there contradiction. Inexplicable as are the 
links which unite the responsibility of man and the 
ordinance of God, we feel in every crisis hour of life, 
either personal or public, that God's hand rules in the 
event in which we trace also a human agency. And 
so to-day, and in all the weary, anxious, hoping, 



despairing, supplicating days of the past eleven weeks 
the people of the land have felt, as they have seldom 
felt before, brought face to face with God's sovereign 
and irresistible providence. And how irresistible and 
supreme that Providence is ! What a testimony to it in 
the unforeseeableness and triviality of the means it 
employs to do its bidding ! That morning of the 
second of July rose sweet and hopeful on the Presi- 
dent and his household, on the nation and its interests. 
Harassed by his routine endeavors to satisfy the 
clamorous seekers for office which had thronged his 
doors for four months (and had not foreborne to hold 
him on the rack of their importunity even through the 
nearly fatal illness of his wife), the President took 
that July morning as the commencement of a little 
sorely-needed outing and holiday. 

When Caesar was assassinated the sacred fowls are 
said to have given signs of approaching trouble, and 
soothsayers sent him warnings. When William of 
Orange was shot down there were those who remem- 
bered or thought they remembered unusual portents 
in the sky. But it was on the sweet morning of a 
pleasant holiday that providential destiny encountered 
and shattered our President. And that Providence 
came in no august and Heaven-suggesting shape. It 
came in the shape of a shambling, scant-clad lounger 
about the railway train, and a second-hand pistol, 
cowardly shot from behind his back. Nor was the 
act (as when Lincoln fell) an act which could be 
regarded as the culmination and embodiment of a 
representative movement or purpose, antagonistic to 
the man or the principle he represented. On the 
contrary, it seems the purely personal conception of 
an individual ungoverned brain ; of which no possible 



9 

sagacity could be forewarned ; against which, for its 
very viewlessness and improbability, it was impossible 
to provide. But it was sufficient for the purpose, as 
the instrumentalities of Providence always are. The 
wounded President exclaimed (as the instinctive burst 
of exigent calamity so often exclaims) "My God," 
and fell senseless to the floor. Yes, the exclamation 
was true. Past the cowering assassin he looked, and 
we needs must look, to the irresistible might of 
Divine providence. 

What a witness, too, to the irresistibleness of that 
Providence comes to us — not alone in the triviality 
and unexpectedness of the means used to bring the 
event about — but in the bafflement and error of the 
higrh medical skill which with so intent and consecrated 
endeavor has striven to avert the appointed result! 
No right-minded man in an hour like this inclines to 
breathe a word of criticism on the skill of the devoted 
men who have stood with all the appliances of their 
science between the President and the grave, vainly 
endeavoring <«> bar liis way thither. 

But surely it is a memorable comment on the 
fallibility of what is supposed to be the highest skill 
and experience, and a striking testimony to the impos- 
sibility of defeating a Divine design, that six or seven 
eminent surgeons were left to probe for eleven weeks 
a channel which the bullet never entered, and to hunt 
for and locate the ball in a spot toward which, even, it 
never went. 

Yes, Providence is great and irresistible. The 
thing determined upon is accomplished. He has his 
way "in the armies of heaven and among the inhabi- 
tants of earth. None can stay his hand or say unto 
him, What doest thou !" It becomes us to recognize 
2 



10 

and humble ourselves before the bared hand of 
Almighty God. 

Another suggestion which rises to the mind on this 
occasion is prompted by the fact that President 
Garfield is the second President of our Republic who 
lias fallen by the hand of Assassination. 

From time to time in the world's past, all through 
human history, assassination has been a not unfrequent 
resort of injured or malignant weakness against arbi- 
trary power. In Asia and in Europe alike, the violent 
taking off of a sovereign is a common way of attempt- 
ing to redress public wrong. Probably the annals of 
no European government of any considerable continu- 
ance but afford illustrations of attempts made on their 
rulers lives. The histories of some of them, like those 
of Russia and France, give examples over and over 
again. It passed into a proverb long ago that "uneasy 
lies the head that wears a crown." And it is un- 
doubtedly owing to the sort of fellow-feeling which 
this apprehension among rulers awakens, that we must 
attribute some considerable portion, at least, of those 
expressions of sympathy in our President's violent 
death which have come from the crowned heads and 
courts of Europe. Assassination is a sore point of 
contemplation over there. A noticeable apprehension 
of it has grown with the later days even of the popular 
and christian British Queen; and increasing precau- 
tions to secure her safety have been nervously required 
by her on her journeys year by year. 

But we, in this Republican land, have not hitherto 
reckoned assassination as among the considerable 
perils of our civil government. The violent taking off 
of Lincoln did not seem to be a case to be particularly 
accounted of, it was so manifestly connected with, and 
expressive of, the great civil conflict of the nation. 



11 



But the death of President Garfield shows that 

Republicanism is no panacea against the violent hand 
of the spirit of regicide. We have enacted here a 
democratic form of government, but a democratic form 
of government [troves to be in itself no security for 
the life of its administrator. Indeed, the very democ- 
racy of our government and its habit of opening the 
channels of office to the rabblement of common 
solicitation, seems to have been the very occasion 
of the introduction of this old-world terror of rulers 
into our body politic. 

We have not a Utopia by having a Republic. 
Human nature is not changed by ability to cast a vote. 
Plainly in the interest of public order, as well as the 
safety of our elected rulers, some added securities 
must be devised to guard the life of our Presidents, 
and to ward off from them the pressure of that 
popular clamor and demand for political office and 
reward,, which can so easily pass over into personal 
malice ; and which in the present terrible case seems 
to be the only explicable hypothesis of Guiteau's great 
crime. We cannot afford to forget the lesson of two 
Presidential assassinations in twenty years. The 
swarming masses of lawless internationalists and com- 
munists poured into our land from foreign shores are 
a dangerous element. And we breed enough such at 
home. And when on a Harvard College platform, at 
an annual commencement, the most eloquent orator of 
America openly advocates "daggers and dynamite" as 
under any circumstances appropriate political weapons. 
it is high time that men who are sane even if not 
eloquent, consider what means must be devised to 
reform our civil service, not only in the interest of 
general purity of administration, but of safety to our 



L2 

elected rulers. Fortunately one agency which can be 
appealed to bring about this end is that sentiment 
which has been so conspicuously manifested by the 
American people these eleven weeks past — the senti- 
ment of loyalty to the President as President. For 
this sentiment has in this period given a wonderful 
disclosure. Loyalty used to be supposed to be the 
peculiar tie which bound the subject of a monarchy 
to his hereditary lord. One of the good things shown 
by the past months of watching by Garfield's sick-bed 
is that it is a tie which can equally bind a citizen of a 
republic to its elected head. 

Wry much, doubtless, of the solicitude and sym- 
pathy the nation lias felt lias been for Garfield as a 
man; but vastly more has been for Garfield as the 
chosen and rightful President. It was because the 
President was assailed ; because the President was 
sick, because the President was likely to die, that men 
were astonished and aggrieved. It is because it is the 
President who died that they will demand that the 
temptations and the perils of his omce be made less. 
The suffrages of the people confers a sacredness from 
assault. The reception of "most votes 11 awakens 
a loyalty to the man who has them, equal to that 
divinity which in other lands is supposed to hedge a 
king. 

Another impressive aspect of the event we sorrow 
over to-day demands our notice. 

This is the effect of our President's assassination, 
and especially of his long sickness and patient suffer- 
ing, in enkindling the sentiment of national and inter- 
national sympathy and brotherhood. It is quite with- 
in the bounds of soberness to say that a parallel 
instance to this fullness of fellowship in one man's 



13 

suffering and death was never before known in the 
history of the race. In the death of Abraham 
Lincoln the people of the North were as profoundly, 
perhaps more profoundly, moved and overwhelmed. 
But the South, except the colored race who loved him 
as a father, did not sympathize in the sorrow. In the 
death of Mr. Lincoln a, considerable part of the 
English people were touched with a tardy but a 
sincere regret. The press and the society, of that 
mother-land which stood so long aloof from us, which 
launched pirates to prey upon our commerce, and cast 
guns to sink our ships, came, at last, in the martyrdom 
of our President, to feel and express a real sympathy. 
But in this case, no prejudice anywhere has chilled 
the fresh outflow of universal emotion. The homes 
of the South have been one with the homes of the 
North, in having through all their households these 
many weeks past this uppermost solicitude, "How is 
the suffering President?" Men who voted for Gar- 
held have not been appreciably or actually different 
from men who voted for Hancock in the intensity of 
this affectionate interest. Party feeling has for the 
moment been forgotten. Religious differences have 
been unregarded. Sectional oppositions have not 
come to mind. The metropolitan press and the fron- 
tier newspaper; the New York stock-board and the 
Nevada grocery have alike made their theme of record 
and anxious watch the variations of one man's pulse 
and the heaving of a single human breast. The solici- 
tude of fifty millions of Americans has been as 
unintermitting and as keen as if each almost was a 
brother born. The Nation has stood by the bedside. 
The Land has watched with him through the nights. 
The Country has taken uo more respite from its care 



14 

than the indefatigable chief -physician in charge of 
the patient's case. It lias been the one great theme 
of conversation, hope, and prayer the whole land 
throngh. 

And other lands have felt with ns. Courts of 
ancient monarchies have made our President's condi- 
tion the theme of enquiry and uttered hope. The 
depths of the ocean have been alive with messages of 
transmitted sympathy and sorrow. The aable insignia 
of mourning ordered by the Queen of England, and 
Kings of Holland and Spain, to be worn by their 
respective Courts as for a brother monarch of Europe, 
bespeak more than an official grief. There can be no 
question that the sympathy is human and sincere. 

This awakening of fellowship in our land and in 
other lands is something to be thankful for. It is, 
indeed, something over which it is easy to gush and 
grow extravagant. A good deal of extravagance will 
doubtless find public utterance on this matter to-day. 
Many pulpits to-day will speak, and many orators 
to-morrow will declaim, as if this hush of partisanship 
at home, and this response of sympathy from abroad, 
were a pretty sure token of the millennium at hand. 
It is not quite so. The political Ethiopian does not 
so easily change his skin, or the office-hunting leopard 
his spots, as this implies. England is still a good 
way off, and has very positive interests and prejudices 
which will not wash out in a few sympathetic tears. 

Let us not unwisely make too much of this; and 
yet, equally, let us not unwisely fail to make as much 
of it as Ave should. It is a sweet, a noble, and an 
auspicious thing. It has in it an encouragement and 
a prophecy. It looks toward — though it still may 
be at a far remove, and over mountains which lie 



15 

between — but it looks toward a time when the land 
shall be in all its length and breadth in brotherhood, 
when nation shall not lift up sword against nation. 
but shall dwell together in lasting peace. 

And the fact that the President's sickness and 
death has brought about a kind of shadow and pre- 
figuration of that time, must be regarded as a very 
fortunate circumstance of his personal career, and as 
going a considerable way, if justification were neces- 
sary, tow aid justifying the providential ordering of 
this his suffering and mortality. 

For it must be candidly admitted, that apart from 
this kind of passive accomplishment (through his 
pain and death) of the fusion of our land in fellow- 
ship, Mr. Garfield's career would have been one rather 
of promise than of completed achievement. 

Very different in this respect of promise and of 
accomplishment is the career of Mr. Garfield from 
that of Mr. Lincoln, with whom, because of the simi- 
larity of their taking off, it is so natural to compare 
him. To Mr. Lincoln was given the felicity of a 
substantia] completion of a great life of active accom- 
plishment. Long-laboring, long-tried, he at last ful- 
filled. He lived to see Lee's surrender, the Union's 
establishment, the Nation saved. And then on the 
Pisgah-top of an accomplished enterprise; the summit 
than which no higher was, he died. It was a life of 
grandest endeavor and consecration, ending at the 
very moment and goal of grandest success. 

Not exactly thus is it with the life whose ending 
we mourn to-day. As soldier and as congressman, as 
legislator and as scholar, Mr. Garfield had done enough 
and nobly for the stations which he filled. But as 
President Tie had opportunities before him, and a possi- 



16 

bility of good to do, which his death, had it occurred 
when he was shot, on the second of July, would 
have left almost wholly unembraced and unfulfilled. 
How he would have accomplished, we can only con- 
jecture and believe. But his survival through these 
long weeks of suffering may (in another way) have 
wrought all, and it may be more than all, that his 
life would have done. That rounds out his life In 
a- nobler accomplishment than perhaps his survival 
would. That makes a benign wholeness in his active 
and in his passive achievement, which even the most 
confident believer in his powers might well hesitate to 
mar by the choice instead for him of four or eight years 
in the presidential chair. Even a life so rich and 
prophetic of noble things as his may, perhaps, have 
been wisely poured out in the passive accomplishment 
of what his suffering has wrought. The providence 
may be already justified. God may not have dealt 
parsimoniously, even for (larfield's earthly utility and 
human fame. 

I am naturally led, by this last suggestion which 
has been made, to one more aspect of the event which 
occupies the world's attention to-day, and one perhaps 
more important in its lasting interest than any other. 
This is that aspect of the event which is presented to 
us when we think of these protracted weeks of earnest 
and general prayer for the President's recovery, termi- 
nated only by his death. 

I have called this the "most important aspect "of 
the whole matter, and it is so. For just so much as 
spiritual interests transcend earthly ones, and as faith 
in (rod is more important than trust in man, so the 
question of the divine warrant and efficacy of prayer 
rises high above all personal or political considerations 



17 

whatsoever. And for myself I do not hesitate frankly 
to say that for more than three weeks past this has 
been my chief solicitude. Much as I sympathized 
with the President as a man ; much as I commiserated, 
his wife and children; much as I felt that the Nation 
could ill-aft'ord to spare his strong hand from the 
helm, still more solicitous and more anxious have I 
been as to the result of his recovery or of his death 
on men's faith in prayer. 

For never, perhaps, nay, never certainly before, 
was there presented so conspicuous a case for the 
seeining appropriate test of this agency of supplica- 
tion. A man desperately wounded, so that medical 
science frankly confessed the physical probability of 
a fatal result ; yet a man prayed for week after week 
by thousands. Making every allowance for the multi- 
tudes who only wished but who never pray, still the 
volume of prayer, — prayer called for by governmental 
summons, and prayer spontaneously arising from 
innumerable household altars and private closets ; 
prayer as earnest and true as ever goes up from 
human lips, that ascended from our land to Heaven 
for the President's restoration was vast and impor- 
tunate. And it did seem as if it m ust be heard ; and 
not only heard, but granted in the precise terms of it. 
It did seem as if it would be a good time for God to 
give his witness — the witness of a direct and exact 
concession of the request — to the supplication of His 
people. In this age of scoffing and materialism, when 
the value of prayer is so extensively denied, it did 
appear that this was a grand opportunity for the con- 
firmation of faith and for the silencing of cavil. If 
God wanted men to pray, now seemed a good time to 
show it. Almost it appeared (speaking reverently) 
3 



18 

as if He could not afford, either for His churches' sake 
or for His own sake, to let the President die. 

You perceive clearly enough that I. have not only 
felt whatever of difficulty lies in this matter, but that 
I am not now disposed to blink it. No, I have felt it 
agonizingly. And instead of puttering about in plati- 
tudes on this occasion. I want for my own sake as 
well as yours, to face the question squarely. 

Eleven weeks of prayer, from end to end of the 
land, for the President's recovery, and he to-day in his 
coffin ! What does it mean ? 

My dear hearers, I do not undertake to convince 
myself or to tell you altogether what it does mean. I 
am not going to pretend to any lights and satisfac- 
tions on this matter which I do not fully discern. I 
am going to treat you just as I treat myself in this 
thing, with the honesty of a man who has his own 
faith to sustain, and his own doubt to silence. 

I mention, then, as one consideration which it 
becomes me, and it becomes you, also, to bear in mind 
(and which we can none of us dispute) that it is right 
and wise for God to deny a specific request of His 
people, if He sees that the granting of it will be 
injurious, or that a better thing can be accomplished 
in its stead. This is a simple proposition, but it is a 
solid one. It holds, in principle, in parental dealings 
with children. The loving parent longing to grant a 
child's desire, lovingly denies the injurious petition, 
or even the petition which seeks a lesser good than 
can otherwise be had. And God ought so to do. 
And so He does, if the meaning of the great pattern 
and exemplar prayer uttered by His own dear Son 
be taken into mind. Christ prayed (in submission, 
doubtless, to the Father's will), but Christ prayed, 



19 

" Let this cup pass from me ! " a distinct and specific 
request. It did not pass. His petition was denied. 
I do not trick myself <>r bother you by saying some- 
thing else was given instead of it. It was denied. 
Why was it denied ( It was denied because to grant 
it would be the loss of the whole enterprise of redemp- 
tion. It was denied because its denial was the con- 
dition of a vastly greater benefit to the human race, 
yea, and to Christ himself also. 

This instance is supremely and everlastingly instruc- 
tive. It discloses the principles upon which God not 
only goes, but on which we see he ought to go in 
granting or denying our requests. He ought not to 
grant them if the granting them is either injurious or 
will prove the barrier to a greater good. And every 
promise on the part of God to hear prayer and grant 
His people's request must be taken, and ought to be 
taken, in subordination to this plain principle (which 
rules even in our poor parental dealings with our 
children) of doing what is best. When, therefore, the 
Word of God says " the prayer of faith shall heal the 
sick, 11 "if two of you on earth shall agree concerning 
anything ye shall ask, it shall be done for you of my 
Father in Heaven, 11 are we to say that that promise 
shall have no possible limitations ? that the sick man 
must get well even if it be better that he should die I 
that the request of the two should be granted, even 
if it is at the cost of loss to hundreds \ Plainly not. 
Common sense denies. The promise must be taken, 
ought only to be considered as given, subject to the 
limitations of a wisdom which knows and does what 
is best. 

How then does the matter of prayer for President 
Garfield's recovery stand ? Already we have seen, 



20 

under another head of this discourse, and dealing with 
matters on a far lower plane than this of prayer, that 
there is very considerable ground for the belief, from 
matters which arc already under our view, that Gar- 
field's death has done as much for his own fame and 
for the Nation's good as his life could have done. 
Already we have seen that there is no small reason 
to conjecture that his name will be held in sweeter 
remembrance, and the nation and the world profited 
more, dying as he has, a death which has moved the 
heart of the world in common fellowship — than if he 
had lived out a full term or a double term of official 
duty. And if this be the case' (as certainly no one 
can deny that it may be the case) then God has done 
kindly in refusing to hear the specific request that the 
President might live. 

Add now to this consideration one more. God 
takes time to complete His purposes. He doesn't 
balance His accounts every eleven weeks. He does 
not show all of what He does in three lunar months. 

He has denied the importunate request of the 
Nation that the President should live. I do not go 
into the evasion of saying he has granted it in some 
other way. He has denied the request. A denial so 
conspicuous, of a request so earnest, seems (1 speak it 
very reverently) seems to demand the vindication of a 
sufficient and manifested reason. 1 confess to a feelimr 

o 

(humble I hope, but profound), that there ought to be 
soon or late, and that soon or late there will be, a 
benefit obvious enough in our President's departure to 
compensate for the perplexity of God's ways in 
seeming to disregard these requests. And such 
obvious benefit I expect to see. Nay, the beginnings 
of it we do already see. 



21 

But since most of the benefits we already behold, 
appear as if they might have been gained by the 
President's protracted suffering and yet his final 
recovery, I therefore look for still further benefits 
which only his death could bring. I think this is 
what is only fair to expect. I think it may reverently 
be said this is what God may be expected in his own 
time to show. 

And so I say to myself and to you. Wait and see! 
God is older than we are, and he has not got through 
with this matter. Before the sod yet covers the 
President, is no time to weigh and decide on the full 
measure, of the results of the death we mourn. Wait 
and see ! God may as well be trusted awhile longer. 
Wait and see ! 

And now in hope and faith we turn to our God and 
to his God whose loss from us we (perhaps largely 
from our very ignorance) deplore. Well is it with 
him ! Well also for us let us trust it will be. < )ur 
human hearts grieve after him, but our Christian faith 
must not despair. Sweet and noble man, farewell ! 
Lovable and Christian soul, farewell ! Scholar, States- 
man, President, farewell ! 

"He is gone who seemed so great; 
Gone, but nothing can bereave him 
Of the force he made his own 
Being here ; and we believe him 
Something far advanced in state ; 
And that he wears a truer crown 
Than any wreath that we could weave him. 

But speak no more of his renown ; 
Lay your earthly fancies down — 
God accept him : Christ receive him." 

Amen. 






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